Online streaming videos have become a popular medium of communication for business, education, social and entertainment purposes. These videos can be accessed and viewed over the Internet in on-demand and in a live video streaming capacity. As a result, users can appreciate instantaneous watching where they need not wait for long periods of time to download a video. Rapid growth in the deployment and usage of the Internet during recent years has led to exponential increase in network traffic. This increase in traffic leads to network congestion and packet loss. With respect to video streaming, increase in network traffic results in volatile performance of the media streaming service, ultimately degrading the quality of the playback experience for the user due to longer initial buffering times and re-buffering events due to poor network conditions and congested media streaming servers.
With high traffic Internet based media streaming systems (e.g., millions to billions of videos per day to different types of clients located worldwide), packets can traverse numerous routers from source to destination and delays can be introduced at any juncture. Tools for discovering causes of interruption in streaming media playback that lead to re-buffering and mechanisms to mitigate re-buffering are lacking given the sheer quantity of data and the number variables involved.